The week's critic wrangle: Er...what?

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By Alison Willmore on 05/26/2006

Save "An Inconvenient Truth," a bit quiet this weekend on the film front. Oh, and there's some comic book movie.

Ian Gamazon. + "Cavite": Neill Dela Llana and Ian Gamazon's uberindie (see this interview with them for more, they're pretty amazing) gets a tiny release in New York and LA and acclaim from all sides. At LA Weekly, some uncredited person (Ella Taylor? Scott Foundas?) writes that it's "nearly as taut from a political standpoint as it is from a narrative one." Dennis Lim at the Village Voice observes that "Despite its indie ingenuity, 'Cavite' is a blockbuster at heart," but that it's "such a shrewd melding of form and content that any seeming contradictions and shortcomings end up working to the film's advantage," and he concludes that "it's some kind of landmark in diaspora cinema." At the New York Times, Stephen Holden does complain that "'Cavite' suffers mightily from the fact that Mr. Gamazon can't act.," he also find that "this unblinking tour of Asian misery nevertheless offers an unsettling contemplation of life at the bottom of the human food chain."

Vincent Lindon. + "La Moustache": Matt Singer, summing up the plot of Emmanuel CarrÃ¨re's film, writes that "This sounds like a comedy, but Emmanuel Carrere's film is deadly serious: it tackles issues like identity and sanity and moustachery. Therefore, it is the coolest movie ever made." And possibly the only one about to link an existential crisis to whether or not a man ever sported a 'stache? Stephen Holden seems to like the film well enough (as is so often the case with his reviews, it's tough to tell):

The film is likely to frustrate those who demand that a mystery be solved and wrapped up with tidy explanations. But its refusal to tie everything up in ribbons and bows is one of its strengths.

Michael Atkinson at the Village Voice (who points out this is a prime time for someone to coin a genre for what he sees as a series of "sweaty French capsule of domestic apocalypse") also likes the film, calling it "sharp and wounding" and concluding that "CarrÃ©re makes the transformation of a silly marital argument into a cosmic upheaval look easy, and profound as well."